


Boys Town

by Sholio



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Babies, Character Study, Friendship, Gen, Kid Fic, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-04
Updated: 2016-07-04
Packaged: 2018-07-20 01:15:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7385152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Missing scene for 1x12, because leaving a baby with a couple of juvenile delinquents is a <i>great</i> idea. For my h/c bingo square "alien abduction".</p>
            </blockquote>





	Boys Town

**Author's Note:**

> I marathoned all of season one of Legends of Tomorrow in the last few days and, well ... this happened. 
> 
> For anyone who's reading this without having seen the show, I'm not sure how much sense this makes without context, but this show's plots are usually amazing acid trips, and this one is no exception. Basically, in this episode, the team is abducting their younger selves and locking them in the ship's cargo hold to keep a time-traveling assassin from killing them. One of the people they abducted is a teenage arsonist, and then they gave him the infant version of his future best friend to take care of.

They had just shoved a baby into his arms and walked out.

A _baby._

Mick stared down at the tiny, squirming lump of sort-of-person in his arms and his mind went totally blank.

He realized after a minute that the blonde chick, Sara, was talking to him. "Hey, punk, give me that baby before you drop him on his head and Freako the Creepazoid kills us both."

"No," Mick snapped, turning away from her. A minute ago he'd been totally expecting them to give the kid to her, and the sight of that lady walking towards him and holding out the little bundle of baby had turned him into a writhing ball of embarrassment and panic. Now, though ...

Now, all he knew was they'd given the baby to him. To _him._ Nobody ever put him in charge of anything like that before. He didn't do babies, they were messy and noisy and smelly and weird, like having a pet that pooped and stank and didn't actually do anything, except ...

Except everything was gone now, _everyone_ was gone, and he was locked up in this warehouse or whatever the hell it was in clothes that still smelled faintly of smoke, and they'd given him a baby to hold.

It was warm and soft, and it squirmed a little and huddled into his chest like it thought he was going to keep it safe.

_Fat chance of that, kid._ He should just give it to Blondie, who was still crowding him and nattering at him. She was a girl, so she might know about babies. At the very least, she wasn't _him,_ which made her a better choice by default. But ...

He didn't want to.

"Give me that baby, weirdo." 

She actually had her hands on the baby now, and for a minute they nearly ended up in a tug-of-war, but the baby flailed its fists and made a whining sound, and that made Sara back off. Mick clutched it tighter to his chest.

"Scram, sister," he snapped. "They gave _me_ the baby, comprende?"

"Wow, look who found his buried paternal instincts all of a sudden."

"Go take a hike," he muttered. 

Sara put her hands on her hips and looked at him, mouth open like she was going to say something mean, but then she looked at the baby (it was curling into his chest again) and her face softened. That look made him even more uncomfortable. He could deal with her anger a lot better than he could deal with having her look at him like that.

"You should be careful to support his head," she said, making a cupping motion with her hands.

"Huh?"

"Babies that little, they can't hold their heads up on their own. His head might flop down and break his neck if you aren't careful."

Mick stared down at the baby in fresh horror. "What, seriously?" How did any babies even survive to grow up?

"It's not -- look, here, I'll show you --"

She held out her hands expectantly. Mick rotated his body (and the baby) away and growled at her.

"Wow. Okay, _fine._ Look, you're doing okay, just if you're going to hold him up, like against your shoulder or whatever, take one hand and put it like this."

She held out her hand and cupped it gently over the back of the baby's little blue knit hat. Then she mimed holding something tiny near her shoulder, with her hand curled around it.

Mick decided not to try it. The baby seemed contented enough for the moment just like it was, snuggled up against him. "How do you know it's a boy?"

"Cause he's in a blue blanket and most parents are very predictable. Anyway, that lady said 'him' when she gave him to you."

Mick looked down at the baby again. His arms were starting to get tired, so he sat down carefully on the floor with his back against the wall and rested the baby in his lap. Sara perched on the edge of a nearby crate and swung her legs.

"You think he's got a name?" Mick asked. He touched the baby's cheek lightly, and was unprepared for the surge of warmth in his chest when its little face turned to follow the brush of his fingers.

"Well, I hope so." Sara thought about it, tapping her fingers on the crate. "But if he's an orphan, maybe not. Who knows where these creepers got that baby from."

An orphan. _I'm an orphan,_ Mick thought, rolling it around in his head, and then pushed the thought away, hard.

He almost hoped the baby was an orphan. It would give them something in common.

The floor trembled under them. "Oh God," Sara groaned, slithering off the crate to the floor. "We're moving again. I almost puked the last time."

"You better not puke now that there's a baby in here."

"What are you talking about, babies puke all the time," she shot back. "They aren't going to judge."

The floor was shuddering heavily now, rattling the crates.

"Where do you think we are, anyway?" Sara asked. "This has got to be some kind of ... of airplane, right? I thought we were on a ship at first, but --"

Her words blurred into unintelligibility as the world did the same horrible, sideways-wrenching thing that Mick was kind of, almost, sort of getting used to by now -- it was the third or fourth time it had happened. The first time, he _had_ puked, though he wasn't gonna admit that to Blondie; it was before their kidnappers had put her in with him. By now it didn't make him quite so sick, but it did make him dizzy, and words seemed to slide sideways out of his brain while the floor rattled under them for what seemed like forever.

When things calmed down, Sara was pressed between two crates, holding onto both of them. Mick was vastly relieved to find out that he still had the baby in his arms, though now it was wide awake and wailing.

"These guys are total assholes," Sara announced.

Mick tried, inexpertly, to soothe the baby. His head hurt and he wasn't quite ready to try standing up yet. If he felt this bad, maybe the baby did too. Sara was right, anybody who'd do that to a baby really was a total asshole. And he knew about assholes, being one himself.

He carefully shifted the baby against his shoulder, cupping the back of its head like Sara had showed him. Its damp little face pressed into his neck, and it stopped crying with a wet hiccup. 

"Wow," Sara said. "You're a natural. Either that or he really likes you."

Mick wanted to say something sarcastic to that, but it might make the baby start crying again. It curled into his shoulder and he jiggled it and, for the first time since he'd stumbled into the grass and sat down to watch, dry-eyed, as his parents' house burned, and his parents along with it ... he kind of almost didn't feel awful.

 

***

 

About twenty minutes later, Trench Coat Dude and Baldy came marching into the warehouse or cargo bay or whatever it was with _another stupid baby._

"You better not have dropped that kid," Baldy told Mick, looming over him, while Trench Coat deposited Baby #2 into the arms of a startled Sara.

Mick glared up as ferociously as he could while holding a baby against his shoulder and being loomed over by a dude the size of a bulldozer. "Screw you, the kid's fine. He's not even crying. See?"

Baldy gave the baby a glance, and his face went through something weird and complicated and almost, for an instant, soft, before hardening into steel again. "Yeah, you better not," he growled, slapping one fist into the gloved palm of the other hand with a meaty smack, and marched out after Trench Coat.

"What's wrong with you people!" Sara called after them. "Are you out of your minds? Wait, no -- come back here -- Come back!"

She struggled to her feet, but they were already gone, so all she could do was stand there helplessly, holding the baby. It started up a thin, miserable wailing.

"Welcome to the club, sister," Mick said. "At least _mine's_ not crying."

"Yeah, laugh it up, jerk," Sara retorted. She looked down at her baby, trying to jiggle it, and made a sound of startled rage. "This baby is a newborn!"

"So?" Mick said. "This one's pretty tiny too --"

"No, you don't understand. This baby was _just born._ It hasn't even been washed yet! It's ... my God, these _people_ ..." She unwrapped the baby partway. "At least the cord is tied off. Ugh. I don't _believe_ this. What'd they do, snatch this baby away from its mother fresh out of the womb?"

"Eww," Mick said, making a face.

"This is effing creepy. You people are total creepers!" Sara shouted at the ceiling. "My dad is going to _mess you up!_ You are going to jail, jerks!"

The floor shuddered. "And here we go again," Mick said, squeezing his eyes shut. It seemed to help a little bit with the disorientation.

Sara moaned.

A rattling, shuddering eternity later, both babies were squalling. Mick's baby turned to have an impressive set of lungs on him, even though he was tiny.

"This is nuts. You know how nuts this is?" Sara complained, wedged among the crates and trying to calm down her baby. "They haven't given us anything to feed them or take care of them with. Actually, they haven't fed _us_ either. How long are they planning on keeping us here?"

"Like I'm supposed to know?" Mick said over the top of his wailing baby. It was starting to irritate him now. "Shut up, brat, or I'll shut you up."

"You monster!" was Sara's predictable reaction. "It's a baby, and he's scared."

Mick scowled at her wordlessly until she broke. 

"Try walking around," she suggested, rocking her baby. "They like that sometimes."

Mick got up on still-wobbly legs and paced between the crates. His baby wailed for a little while longer and then settled into heavy, damp breathing against his shoulder. He was not about to credit Sara with this; it had probably just tired itself out.

He had definitely gotten the better of the two babies, he thought smugly as Sara's baby continued to make gaspy little wails. His baby was a much better baby than hers.

Time passed. Sara's baby settled back to sleep, or at least tired itself out enough to stop crying. Mick's baby hadn't started crying again, but it had started getting restless and squirmy, and there was a weird smell in its vicinity that he didn't want to think about too much.

"I'm thirsty," Sara said. "I can't believe they're _leaving_ us here!"

"You can open the door anytime you want, right?" Mick said. He nudged the door in question with his toe. "We can just walk out of here."

"But what about the babies?"

"What about 'em?" Mick asked, squashing a surge of some sort of unwelcome feeling for the smelly little thing currently squirming in his arms.

"Baldo said he'd kill you if anything happened to that baby."

"Like I care," Mick scoffed, but just then footsteps came tapping down the stairs and the other lady, the one who wasn't a freaky older Sara clone, came in with ...

"No," Sara groaned at the sight of the blanket-wrapped bundle in the lady's arms. "No, no, no! This whole thing is a nightmare, isn't it? This is like one of those dreams where you don't study for the test and they keep asking impossible questions, except this is about my -- my repressed baby-urges or something. It's all the fault of Mrs. Hickman's Human Sexuality class and that stupid fake baby we had to carry around for two weeks. I didn't mean to drop my baby in the toilet --"

"Don't worry, you two," the lady said, looking like she was trying not to laugh. She had a bag slung over her shoulder, and she deftly transferred the baby to one arm while she unslung it. It was clear that she was a woman who knew how to handle a baby. "You don't have to do this all alone. I'm here to help."

"Lucky us," Mick muttered.

The lady sat on the floor and beckoned them over. "Come here. We'll get these little guys fed and changed. I've got some lunch for you guys too."

"So is this the point where you drug our food and we wake up in a brothel in Kazakhstan?" Sara asked suspiciously.

"No, this is the point where I get all of you fed while we find a safe place for you to stay for a little while." The lady smiled and patted the floor beside her. This made Mick suspect she was up to something, but it seemed to work on Sara, who got up and came over cautiously. 

"Here," the lady said, holding out the baby she'd brought with her. "Trade you. This little guy's eaten, so you can hold him for awhile, and I'll feed the one you've got there."

Sara looked belligerent and wrapped her arms more tightly around her baby. "Look, lady, this baby was just born. A bottle is not going to cut it. There's stuff they have to do to newborn babies, like drops in the eyes and things --"

"Don't worry. Gid -- uh ... a doctor friend of ours already took a look at him. He's already been checked out and had all the usual things done. He's probably in much better shape than if we'd left him where we found him."

"Which is where?" Sara asked, but the lady didn't answer, just kept holding out the newly arrived baby like she was offering a gift. It seemed to be sleeping contentedly.

"You too. Come on over here," the lady told Mick, as Sara swapped babies with a resigned look.

Mick approached cautiously, but all she did was hand him a bottle. It was warm to the touch.

"Aren't you going to do this?" he asked, teetering on the edge of a brand new surge of panic. Okay, maybe he could hold a baby and stop it from crying, but he couldn't _feed_ one. He'd probably make it choke to death or something.

"I can't feed two babies at once. Sara, can you show him? Your oth -- uh -- I understand you've done some babysitting before, so you must know how. Or, Mick, she can do it, if you'd rather."

Sara gave the adult woman a long suspicious look, but the woman was focused on the baby, trying to get him to take a bottle, so she turned her attention to Mick. "Sit," she said. 

Mick thought about standing just to be stubborn, but then the baby gave another convulsive squirm -- he was only holding it with one arm now -- and he tried to imagine juggling the baby _and_ the bottle while trying to get the bottle in the baby ... and, yeah, that was a good way to drop the baby and get his face bashed in by Steroid Freak. Besides, the idea of hurting the baby, even by accident, made his stomach knot up. So he sat.

"Hold him in the crook of your arm like you were before. Yeah, like that." Sara showed him how to tilt up the bottle so the baby could drink from it.

The baby might be tiny, but no one had to tell _him_ what bottles were for -- not like the baby that the adult lady was even now trying to coax to latch onto the nipple. Mick's baby seized the nipple in the grip of its tiny mouth and started sucking away.

Yeah. He definitely got the best baby out of the bunch. Nobody else's baby was anywhere near as good.

He couldn't stop watching the baby as it ate, fascinated by the sucking motions of its little mouth and the jerky movements of its tiny fists. It was so small and helpless. Mick didn't think of himself as a protective type of person. He was more the type who beat up littler kids and stole their lunch money. But now, for the first time, he found himself wanting to protect something smaller than himself.

The baby's screwed-up eyes opened as it concentrated on the bottle. It had dark eyelashes and cloudy blue eyes that seemed to gaze through Mick, as if it was looking at something beyond him. Then it suddenly seemed to figure out how its eyes worked, and focused on him, which was even more disconcerting.

He looked away from its intense gaze and glanced up to find out that the lady, having finally gotten her baby to take its bottle, was now watching _him._ Mick didn't like the way she was looking at him; it made him uncomfortable in the same way as when Sara gave him that soft look earlier. It was warm and gentle and ... like she knew something he didn't, he thought.

"What?" he demanded.

"Nothing," she said with a soft ghost of a smile, shaking her head. "Just ... thinking. You're surprisingly good with that baby."

"That's what I said," Sara piped up, the little blabbermouth. "I think he's a natural, don't you?"

"Yes," the lady said, and her gaze was still on Mick. "I think I'm starting to realize that."

Mick looked away, scowling. He didn't know why that made him so angry, only ... he _wasn't_ whatever they obviously thought he was. He wasn't a person who cuddled babies and had grown women coo at him. He was mean and he didn't have friends. He liked to watch fire burn more than he liked being around people. Adults hated him and other kids were scared of him. And he _liked_ it that way.

Sitting crosslegged on the cold metal floor, with the smoke of the house fire still stinging his nose and eyes, he was suddenly so cold he was shivering. He wished he had a match, or a lighter, or anything to make a flame ... something to warm him, something to make a fire he could stare into, instead of these people's _eyes_ on him.

But he was trapped here, so he couldn't. And the baby was warm in his lap, not scorching like a house fire, but warm like a campfire -- like a tiny little fire that could almost, maybe make him stop shivering.

It wasn't as fascinating as a fire. Nothing was. But, as he watched it drink its bottle, while the cloudy blue eyes gazed at him as if it found him as interesting as he found it, he almost felt warm.


End file.
